In today's world, there is a wide variety of benefits that are available to a consumer where access to the benefits depends upon the consumer's possession of a card. For example, some of the benefits, to which a typical consumer may gain access by possessing a card, include proof of identity, proof of professional licensing, entry to an exclusive membership club, entry to an access-restricted location, access to credit services, telephone system use, and accrual of loyalty rewards/incentives such as frequent flier miles or grocery store discounts and rebates. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,924,080, which is hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a system that may enable a consumer to receive discounts without the burden of using coupons, similar to the system currently used by many grocery stores.
Due to the desirability of such benefits, consumers in today's world typically carry a wide array of cards in their wallets and purses. The cards consumers now carry include, among others, credit cards, driver's licenses, club membership cards, frequent flier cards, professional registration cards, retailer loyalty cards, and security-related restricted-access cards. Typically, each of these consumer cards contains information about the specific user or consumer, information about the service or benefit provider and information serving to define the benefits or services, to which the consumer is entitled by virtue of his or her possession of the card. The information concerning the card member may include photographs, signatures, fingerprints, and other information that identifies or describes the card member. Information regarding the identity of the service provider and the associated benefits, to which the card member is entitled, may be readily ascertained by reading the face of the card, may be encoded or accessed by using the card. Information may be incorporated onto the cards through a variety of means including imprinting, punching, laminating, embossing, bar encoding, magnetic stripe encoding, and even affixation or incorporation of micro-chips. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,998,753, which is hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a driver's license formed as a plastic card.
Unfortunately, due to the proliferation of services and benefits currently available from diverse service providers, the quantity of cards that average consumers carry has become unreasonably and unnecessarily burdensome. For example, on a single shopping trip, a typical consumer may carry a drivers license to drive their motor vehicle to the merchant's location, a membership card to obtain access to the merchant's exclusive membership club, a calling card to make phone calls during the shopping trip, and a credit card to obtain credit services to facilitate the purchase of goods from the merchant. Yet, it can be cumbersome and uncomfortable to carry all these necessary cards in one's wallet, pocket or purse.
Thus, it would be advantageous to decrease the volume of cards that a consumer must carry while retaining the consumer's access to the full array of benefits provided by the diversity of service providers. U.S. Pat. No. 5,590,038, which is hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a universal electronic transaction card that may serve as a credit card, identification card, and medical card. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,844,230, which is also hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a card that may contain the information of two credit cards on a single card. While these references attempt to decrease the volume of cards a consumer must carry to access a given set of services, they require, among other elements, multiple sets of embossed information and multiple magnetic stripes.
Simultaneous with this desire to reduce the volume of cards, there is an evident need to increase the information carrying capacity of such consumer cards. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,308,121 and a related patent, U.S. Pat. No. 5,503,434, both of which are hereby incorporated by reference, disclose credit cards that can be unfolded to allow more room for the printing of information. Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 4,066,873, which is also hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a banking identification and access card that contains a magnetic stripe and a bar code on the back of the card that can be scanned by a scanning apparatus.
Yet, despite these varied efforts at increasing the utility of consumer cards while decreasing the volume of cards a consumer must carry, no card currently exists that offers the combined benefits of multiple cards without necessitating the incorporation of additional embossed information or magnetic stripes on the associated card. Furthermore, the prior art attempts at reducing the quantity of cards a consumer must carry are typically aimed at modifying the cards, rather than modifying the processes and systems employed by the individual benefit providers, such that the consumer may continue to enjoy benefit from multiple providers. In fact, none of the methods or systems for providing a multiplicity of services through a single card that are known in the art involve substantial administrative cooperation between distinct service providers.
Furthermore, it has become apparent that consumers who seek access to a particular set of benefits from one service provider are more likely to desire access to a second set of benefits from a distinct class of service providers. For example, it stands to reason that consumers who access a membership shopping club are likely to desire credit services during their trip to the club. Therefore, it would be advantageous for providers of distinct services such as credit services and membership club shopping services to cooperate to offer a single card that provides consumers with access to the benefits of the currently separate and distinct cards. By doing so, a primary party provider of credit services and a partnering membership club can encourage use of their respective services while providing a synergistic administrative benefit to themselves and their consumers.
Moreover, the separate cards currently carried by a typical consumer contain a multiplicity of duplicate information such as pictures, signatures, addresses, billing information, etc. Therefore, it would be advantageous to minimize duplication of identical information on multiple cards. It would further be advantageous for the information to be grouped on the different sides of a single card such that a first side of the card provides a first set of benefits while the other side of the card provides access to a separate and distinct set of benefits. Thus, it would be advantageous to have a multiple-service card that functions to provide a consumer with the benefits typically provided by distinct service providers. It would further be advantageous if the multiple-service card did not require multiple card-like elements connected by a hinge or the use of multiple magnetic stripes. It would further be advantageous to have a system and method to facilitate cooperation between separate and distinct providers of card services.
Further, it would be advantageous to have a multiple-service card that functions as both a credit card as well as a separate entity's membership card. It would also be advantageous for the multiple-service card to feature the customer's picture on the card's back side, rather than on its front side. It would also be advantageous to have the picture that is to be placed on the back of the card captured by the service partner and passed to the card generator. It would also be advantageous to have a card that contains a bar code that may be scanned at the point of sale when customers make purchases so that the scanned data may be forwarded directly to the service partner's systems for reporting and tracking purposes.
Some financial transaction instruments, such as credit cards and loyalty program cards, are capable of accessing information related to multiple accounts. For example, a credit card may be able to access membership data associated with both a credit card account and a wholesale purchase club account. These financial transaction instruments may generally include one or more applications for selecting and then securely utilizing a sub-set of specified account information. However, the systems associated with these cards typically delegate the loading of these applications and management of the related data sets to third parties on behalf of both the issuer of the instrument and “application tenants” residing on the issuer's financial transaction instruments. Managing data associated with a credit card via the issuer/third party may involve time consuming steps such as requesting permission to manage data, conforming to data standard formats, and implementing changes. Thus, traditional solutions for managing multiple application tenants are disadvantageous in that the traditional solutions leave a disproportional burden on the issuer and/or the delegated third party in terms of managing accounts on a financial transaction instrument.
Another disadvantage is that, in general, the financial transaction instruments, which are capable of accessing information related to multiple accounts, are typically designed to access only those multiple accounts managed by the same issuer. For example, the same issuer provides both the credit card and the wholesale purchase club account to the user. As such, the issuer providing both accounts generally establishes its own application tenant storage format and management protocol related to the accounts. The established format and protocol is ordinarily different from any format or protocol used by other unrelated issuers, which provides the issuer increased control over access to the account data. Because of the differing unique protocols/formats amongst issuers, multiple issuers typically provide a transaction instrument corresponding to an account offered by the issuer, where the data for accessing the account is stored in that issuer's protocol/format. Thus, a user wishing to access multiple accounts managed by different issuers, must ordinarily carry at least one transaction instrument per issuer. Carrying multiple transaction instruments can be inconvenient in that the instruments may be more easily misplaced, lost or stolen, preventing the user from accessing the account.
Another disadvantage of the above conventional methods of managing multiple accounts, which is related to the different issuer formats/protocols, is that, since conventional financial transaction instruments typically only store application tenant information related to one issuer, the information may not be recognized by a second issuer distinct from the first. That is, the user of the financial transaction instrument typically is only able to use the financial transaction instrument at locations identified by the issuer of the transaction card. The financial transaction instrument may not be used at any other locations, since the locations not identified by the user will not recognize the application tenant information which is typically stored on the instrument in a issuer determined format. As such, in order to access multiple accounts managed by different issuers using different formats/protocols, the user must typically carry multiple cards, as noted above.
In addition to the above, the conventional multiple account management systems have another disadvantage in that data contained on the financial transaction instruments may not be easily updated. That is, traditional financial transaction instruments are only “readable” instruments, and not “writeable” instruments, where the data on the instrument may be read from the instrument but not written to the instrument. More particularly, once the financial instrument is issued to the user, the data often may not be modified. Instead, where information contained on the instrument is to be modified, a new physical consumer device (e.g. transaction instrument) often needs to be issued. That is, the information stored on the financial transaction instruments are typically not permitted to be changed without issuer involvement. The issuer may be involved, for example, by verifying compatibility of a proposed new or updated information, checking conformance of the data to the issuer's standard formatting and size guidelines, and implementing the changes. Thus, additional burdens are placed on the issuer where it is necessary to add unique data sets to a financial transaction instrument, or to update the data stored thereon.
As such, the ability to store data on a single financial transaction instrument thereby permitting a user of the single instrument to complete transactions using multiple transaction accounts issued by different distinct issuers, does not exist. A need exists for a single financial transaction instrument which stores multiple independent data sets provided by multiple distinct issuers irrespective of the format/protocol of the various issuers. A need further exists for a single financial transaction instrument which may be used to efficiently manage the data sets and applications stored on the instrument, irrespective of the protocol used by an issuer to process the data. Even more particularly, a need exists for a system for managing multiple transaction accounts of differing formats on a single financial transaction instrument which is issued to a user, and which permits the user to access different accounts provided by multiple distinct financial account issuers.